Feldon
According to player reports, it seems an unintended consequence of today’s patch is that Marks of Manaar have disappeared from loot tables of enemies in various Sentinel’s Fate dungeons. We’ll update you as we know more. UPDATE: It appears that all Quest Drops off of mobs may now be broken. More info as we have it.
EQ2
When the expansion launched, tinkerers (and others) noticed that Tinkering Blueprints for the expansion were not dropping. This has now been resolved with today’s hotfix.
As of 12:40pm PST From Kiara: EU servers are now up. The BG’s have not been enabled for any of the international servers, due to the database issue. We’ll let you know when they will be available. Thank you for your patience today, we appreciate it.
To deal with the AA/Level loss from players who jumped into Battlegrounds, we’ve heard from Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums: There will be no server-wide rollback. This problem affected about 200 users and rolling each back individually will be much less intrusive than taking down every world and rolling back all of their databases. Please be sure to petition if you lost AA or XP due to battlegrounds.
From Rothgar, who is now officially having a bad day: The issue with AA’s being reset seems to be a server configuration error. We have locked the battlegrounds world to keep new matches from starting up while we fix the configuration. We will have more information very soon about how to proceed if you’re missing some AA after coming back.
Minutes after Battlegrounds went live on U.S. servers we are already hearing reports from players of numerous problems when their characters reach the Battlegrounds servers and further problems upon returning to their home servers. Reports include: Alternate Advancement (AA) points are being reset to 200 points. Any percentage gain over your level (for example level 88 with 90% to level 89) is lost. AA trees are completely reset. Macros that use AA-derived spells do not work on Battlegrounds. At this point, we are advising players to NOT touch Battlegrounds until they are fixed.
US Servers are unlocked and Battlegrounds are now live. EU Servers still have approximately 1 hour of downtime remaining. For more info on Battlegrounds: EQ2Wire Battlegrounds Strategy Guide and Battlegrounds @ EQ2Players
Here are your Hotfix Notes for February 25th, after the jump..
According to Brenlo on his Twitter, work continues on getting Battlegrounds up today. This is resulting in a longer than expected downtime. Maintenance is running a little long. We are working on some network settings for the Battlegrounds. UPDATE: We are restarting the servers and expect to have everything up and running about 10am PST.
If you read our coverage of Game Update 55 including Consolidated Stats and Primary Stat Changes and have checked out the EQ2Wire Mega-FAQ, you’re probably fully up to speed on the changes to Stats, Stat Consolidation, etc. But if not, or you want to hear it from the source, timetravelling has posted a thread which covers these topics. He’s received several questions after the fact, so it’s likely that his writeup will continue to evolve.
Rothgar is looking for your feedback on some planned changes for Macros to improve server performance.
So today marks the release of the Digital Download in North America and Canada. For those unfortunate souls who couldn’t get their hands on a retail copy, your expansion begins today. Do you really miss anything by being a week late? Well, there are those server discoveries (which EQ2Players isn’t tracking properly). And there’s the chance of making a lot of plat being first to sell shinies, tradeskilled materials, rare items, etc. We have received player reports but have not yet empirically confirmed ourselves that there may have been some monkeying around with how combat XP is converted to...
Server downtimes have been announced for both Wednesday, February 24th, and Thursday, February 25th.
Players who do all of their gameplay on Test (and work hard to find and report any bugs they find) were rather concerned about the idea that Test would be down for “a couple of days”. Fortunately, Windslasher has reported in: Test is now unlocked. Thanks for waiting! Glip the Gnome also chimed in: The Test Server is open and ready for business. We just wanted to be super careful that the potential corruption issue relating to battlegrounds affected as few characters as possible. Antonia Bayle, Bazaar, and Sebilis came up after approximately 3 1/2 hours. We’ll see a...
Several players have reported that Xilaxis the Explorer in the new Labs x4 raid zone is not dropping any loot other than small wooden chests of plat (not a bad reward, but some armor would be nice). Fortunately, timetravelling is on the case: I found the issue with both his normal- and challenge-mode item tables and corrected them. Should be hotfixed soon, apologies for the frustrations! No words on those pants though.
You’ll remember that one of the biggest complaints about the Rise of Kunark expansion is that combat XP was so minimal that hours spent in a dungeon barely budged the adventure level meter. The only means to level was to Solo. In an ironic twist, players are reporting that it is not possible to level from 80 to 90 entirely by soloing in Sentinel’s Fate. At level 86 or 87 with mastercrafted or T1/T2 gear, the first wing of the Hole should be no problem for 2-3 casual players. And you’ll earn enough XP to reach 90 in just...
All EQ2 servers are back up after today’s hotfix, with the exception of Antonia Bayle, Bazaar and Sebilis which will remain down for some additional maintenance as announced yesterday. Test came down for a few hours as well.
Here are you February 23 Hotfix Notes: GENERAL Ole’ Man Silvers should be willing to talk to you now. Players who have lost or dropped their Huge Tiger Claws for the quest “Justice for Jojo” can loot another pair. TRADESKILLS The rare 10 quicksilver +1 rare harvest from gem nodes in Odus is now awarding kaborite instead of ulteran diamond as the rare.
With every expansion, a few of the guards in Qeynos and Freeport, especially the “stronghold” or most-defended area of each city, in this case North Qeynos and East Freeport, are dinged to a level that would make them perilous to invaders of the opposing alignment. So imagine our surprise when we logged in after Game Update 55 (coinciding with Sentinel’s Fate) and found that every man, woman, and child guarding the cities of Qeynos and Freeport, in every area of the city, all magically dinged level 95. These guards are packing heat!
One of the unique characteristics of the Ranger mythical bow Eagle’s Talon is that it allowed the user to do ranged auto-attacks at point blank range (zero meters distance). Once a ranger has completed the Epic Repercussions quests, they are awarded an enervated version of Eagle’s Talon with all of the special effects stripped off, and then zero-concentration spells are added to their Knowledge book to get all those unique effects on whatever bow they decide to use. The issue is that those persistent buffs do not grant the ability to use other bows at point blank (0m) range....
The good news: Battlegrounds are now enabled on Test and Test Copy. The bad news: Test is closed until Battlegrounds have passed their sanity checks and considered “ready to go live”. This may be Wednesday or Thursday. OUCH It doesn’t make a lick of sense to me. Folks on Test are used to things being broken, unstable, etc. They can always just NOT go to Battlegrounds if they are buggy. Posted on EQ2 Forums
Tomorrow morning (Tuesday, February 23rd) brings a Hotfix: We’re going to be bringing down the servers in the morning for brief hotfix. Also there are 2 Server Downtimes to report from the EQ2 Forums. Beginning at 6:00 AM PST on Tuesday, February 23, 2010, the Antonia Bayle, Bazaar and Sebilis servers will be offline for maintenance. We expect the downtime to last around 2 hours. (from the forum post) Beginning at 6:00 AM PST on Thursday, February 25, 2010, the Butcherblock, Lucan D’Lere and Nagafen servers will be offline for maintenance. We expect the downtime to last around 2...
Battlegrounds have slipped again to February 25th. From the EQ2 Forums. Since we’ve stated in this thread that the Battlegrounds feature is launching on the 23rd with the digital launch, I’m updating here to say that we’re actually going to be pushing it back a few days to put a few extra anti-cheating measures in place. The plan is for Thursday the 25th If there are any other updates, we’ll let you know!
Many folks (including myself) have been trying to figure out the purpose of the Gruegnach illusion available from the NPC when you first zone into The Hole, and what, if any benefit it creates. There’s a thread on the EQ2 Forums which works out exactly how it works. It’s rather tricky to say the least, but at least we now know what EQ2 Devs were aiming for. UPDATE: timetravelling indicates in the same thread I linked above that he is aware of the complexity of how this illusion works and will be working to clean things up. Leveling Slowdowns...
It has been an interesting week, to say the least. Expansion launch weeks always are. It’s also been a rather bumpy ride for the servers and developers resolving issues that made it through Beta. We’re trying to get back into the habit at EQ2Wire of skimming the forums and finding the gems of info which may be of interest to our readers. Here’s the standouts for this week: What is the Golden Path? Adornment and Tinkering Recipes Not Dropping Guard Level bump to 95 TSO Tradeskill Instance recipe books Will of aTyrant questlines remain nVidia 3D Vision Shaders 3.0